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Fighting spam and astroturfing is something that affects lemmy as a whole ecosystem. Yes it’s more possible with instances which have open registrations but as a counterpoint closed registration also drive people away.

I'm in agreement towards this. The only reason Lemmy.world is so uncomfortably large is that everyone here decided to close registrations when Reddit was having the migration. sh.itjust.works was literally born because of the fact everyone else was either closing off registration entirely or requiring applications.

Call it spam defense or whatever you want but asking people to essentially beg for an account, which is what you're doing, don't whitewash it, increases the barrier to entry and makes it so people don't even want to try joining out of fear of rejection, or worse they try, don't know they were rejected, and think Lemmy is a buggy piece of shit and leave. Maybe it makes automated spam a tiny bit harder and moderation that much lazier and laid back but those who are really commited, the astroturfers, are still going to register and write up applications filled with sweet lies to get you to hit approve, and you will hit approve because they'll seem like normal users.

@[email protected] uh, don't take any of this personally, this isn't made to target anyone specifically, I'm just trying to point out how the behavior of other instances in the Fediverse has contributed towards world becoming so uncomfortably large (and ultimately difficult to moderate because of it).

We’re all in this together and should try to find ways to collaborate our defenses instead of attacking other admins

The only way this works (if I am to take their moderation at face value) would be for us to make more bot accounts than them.

With that said, it's already a terrible system that benefits the 1% (who is very capable of paying devs/server farms/bot nets/etc to boost their investments).

Allowing the bots is allowing the 1% to choose the exact narrative that we see on Lemmy.